


Burn Your Name (Right Across the Sky)

by Defira



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety, Depression, F/M, Fish out of Water, Mental Health Issues, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Romance, Strangers to Lovers, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-07-06
Packaged: 2018-11-10 04:55:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11120331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Defira/pseuds/Defira
Summary: Stardew Valley- and the quaintly picturesque Pelican Town- seems like the ideal place to withdraw from the world for a bit. Shane's certainly been doing his best to vanish, looking for an escape at the bottom of every glass in the saloon for the last few months. The arrival of a new face in town means he's no longer the newbie, no longer the main attraction for the gossips in the town square, and in theory, that should be everything he could have hoped for.But the arrival of Emmy over on Waite Farm throws his fragile existence into chaos, and it's a lot harder to keep his head down when she keeps bumping into him...





	1. Chapter 1

The door to the JojaMart chimed cheerfully, the perky _ding-dong_ rattling through his skull with the same sort of subtlety that a freight train going through a tunnel had. Shane gritted his teeth until his jaw ached, staring dully ahead at the shelves as he rotated the bags of rice to put the older ones at the front; the gust of cold air from the front of the store reached him a few seconds after the chime, and the ratty, threadbare jacket he wore to work did little to keep the chill at bay. 

He heard Morris greet the poor soul with that nasally voice of his, loudly polite but snide in a way that always made him want to check that he wasn’t walking around with old food on his shirt, even when it wasn’t directed at him. His boss knew all the words to say to make something sound polite, but damn if he could actually imbue them with any sort of human sincerity. 

“Umbrellas at the front of the store, if you please, miss,” he said loudly, that gratingly sneering tone again. Shane couldn’t hear the response from whoever Morris was talking to, but Morris liked to make sure everyone in the district could hear him talking. Plus, just because it was technically spring didn’t mean the weather had gotten the memo yet, and the rain pelting down against the glass at the front of the store sort of drowned out any normal attempts at conversation. 

At least the weather matched his mood, he thought, as he stared blankly ahead and continued from the rice onto the bags of flour. A rumble of thunder echoed through the valley, and he grimaced; why was everything so fucking _loud_ today? He wasn’t particularly hungover, but every little scrape and beep and clang in the store today seemed determined to piss him off a thousand times more than normal-

“Excuse me?”

“ _What?_ ” he snarled, rounding on who he thought was Jane, their lone checkout operator- and instead found himself staring into the face of a half drowned woman who looked so terrified of him that it was probably even money on whether she was going to keel over backwards or burst into tears. 

_Fuck_. And now he’d yelled at a customer. Just what he fucking needed, another reason for Morris to dock his pay. Gritting his teeth and closing his eyes for a moment to force himself towards calm, Shane took a deep breath. “I mean, welcome to JojaMart, how can I help you today?”

She stared, her mouth hanging open as if she'd gasped, and her eyes suspiciously bright. Fantastic, she was going to fucking cry. 

“Uh, ma’am?”

“Do you have a pharmacy?” she blurted out, the words tumbling out as if she needed to get them out before they exploded. “Like a- like a drugstore, I mean?”

He blinked at her. “Uhh-”

“It’s just, most of the bigger stores in Zuzu City, the JojaMarts, I mean, they have a drugstore counter? At the back of the store?”

God, she talked a fucking mile a minute. He didn't think she’d taken a breath once during that ramble. Her long brown hair looked like it might have been curly, but she was so soaking wet that it was hanging down around her shoulders in dripping strands- and speaking of shoulders, those were shaking, probably from the cold. He’d heard Morris tell her not to drag a dripping umbrella around the store, but it seemed sort of pointless given how much water she was trailing after her. 

She was staring. Fuck, he was staring too, she’d said something, right? Drugstore, that was it.

He grunted. “Over the counter stuff is in aisle eight, with the toothpaste.”

“No, I-” Her eyes were pleading, like she was trying to get him to clue in to something. “I _need_ a drugstore.”

He shrugged. “Don’t have one,” he said, starting to turn back to the shelving. 

She let out a little sound, something that was sort of like a whimper, and he hesitated. Glanced at her quickly, taking in the tear bright eyes- fuck, her eyes were so deep and brown, like some of the topaz he’d seen back in the town museum before the old curator had absconded with the collection. And maybe he just wanted to be left alone, or maybe he actually felt a pang of sympathy for her, this stranger who seemed by some horrifying twist of fate to be having a worse day than him. 

Shane sighed, eyes squeezed shut as he pinched the bridge of his nose. What he really wanted right now was a couple of aspirin and a dark room, and maybe some greasy, spicy food to settle his stomach. “Harvey,” he said.

“What?”

“ _Harvey_ ,” he repeated, from between gritted teeth. “The doctor. At the clinic, next to Pierre’s-” 

“Pierre’s is closed,” she said quickly. “I- I went there first.”

“Yeah, but Harvey will still be in,” he said, already regretting his moment of weakness. “He does the town’s drugs.”

_Wow, Reynolds, could you have made that sound any more fucking dodgy?_

But she didn’t seem to think anything of it, the way her shoulders dropped with relief almost comical. She breathed out, almost a sigh, and whispered “Thank you.” 

Well, chalk this up as one of his more awkward encounters with a customer. “Er- yep.” Social metre well and truly maxed out, he very pointedly turned back to his cart, picking up the next bag of flour and dumping it on the shelf so firmly that the whole frame rattled. 

She hesitated beside him for a long moment, as if she was waiting for him to be an actual civil human being and say one of the usual pleasantries- _you’re welcome_ or _no problem_ or even just _goodbye_ \- but that was her mistake. Assuming he was an actual civil human being. Right now, if he could go the rest of the day without speaking to another soul, he would be well and truly okay with that. Finally she let out an awkward sort of cough and shuffled around the mess he’d made in the aisle, leaving a wet trail behind her as she headed back towards the entrance like some kind of overgrown snail. 

Guess who was probably gonna get yelled at to clean that up in fifteen minutes. 

He shook his head, ignoring the movement on the edge of his vision; instead, he glanced at his watch, the plastic screen reflecting the fluorescent overhead lights back into his eyes. Five hours to go. 

The cheerful _ding-dong_ of the electronic doors sounded again, followed a moment after by a new bluster of cold air surging along the aisles. “Thank you for choosing JojaMart, for all your daily needs!” Morris called after her, his nasally voice like a fucking drill on the inside of his skull. A shiver ran up his spine from the cold, uncomfortable and unwanted, and he ignored it. "Join us and thrive!"

The door slid closed again, and he started to count to himself. _One, two, three, four, five-_

“Reynolds.”

He kept his expression flat with extreme effort. “‘Sup,” he said, not looking up at Morris. He knew it infuriated him more when he didn’t grovel and fawn like the sycophantic little peon his boss wanted. 

He could just about hear Morris’ teeth grinding in irritation, and it gave him a perverse sort of joy. “She didn’t purchase anything,” Morris said, the words like an accusation. Like it was _his_ fault she’d walked out without buying any of their shitty name brand crap. “What did you say to her?”

“Not much.”

“Did she shoplift? Is that why she didn’t buy anything?” 

Okay, now the amusement at Morris’ annoyance was fading, because now it was being offloaded onto him; he dumped the next bag of flour with a little more force than was necessary, a small cloud of white billowing out from the shelf and into his face. It took every ounce of control to not cough. “Not that I saw.” 

“Hmph. You’re supposed to be aware of our customers at all times, Reynolds. If the stocktake shows a noticeable loss of produce, it’ll be coming out of your pay.” 

The next bag of flour landed so heavily that the metal shelves rattled again. “Yes, _sir_ ,” he said sullenly. 

Morris stalked off without any further snide comments, and Shane stared blankly at the shelf as he lied to himself and told him it was practically home time anyway. God, he wanted a fucking drink so bad- he wanted to be out of here, away from the glare of the overhead lights, and with nothing but a drink for company. 

“Psst.”

Of course, he’d never be so lucky. 

“Psst.” He didn’t look up, gritting his teeth and ignoring where Sam was leaning around the end of the aisle. “Shane, buddy.”

He was almost entirely certain that Sam had never referred to him as his buddy ever. “What?”

Sam had his JojaMart hat stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans, and his hair was immaculately styled to look like he hadn’t styled it at all. Shane felt grossly dishevelled in comparison, with his tatty, worn jacket and scuffed shoes, but at least he hadn’t spent hundreds of dollars to achieve that look. “Who was that chick?” 

His patience for idiocy had been at zero when he’d arrived at work, and it was dropping further and further with each passing moment. “Who?” he asked irritably. 

“That chick that came in just now, the one you were talking to. She was hot.” 

He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t noticed, but he honestly didn’t give a shit. The last thing he wanted to do was to encourage Sam into thinking they had some kind of locker room camaraderie, ogling women together; really, he didn’t want Sam talking to him at all. He just wanted to come to work, get his paycheck, and go home without being forced to talk to any more than the absolute minimum number of people.

When he didn’t answer, Sam hovered for a second or two more, as if hoping for a response; when nothing came, he sighed dramatically and wandered off, probably going to avoid more work by going to flirt with Jane again. He glanced down at his watch, hoping that by some miracle, it would have jumped forward four and a half hours. 

It hadn’t even been four and a half minutes. 

The in-store speakers crackled, the dingy old rock song cutting off mid word. “Clean up in aisle four, Shane please,” Morris said, his voice almost painfully smug. “Clean up in aisle four.”

Shane was already in aisle four. 

He closed his eyes- apparently it was going to be one of _those_ days. 

____

Winter was still clinging on tight with icy claws when he left the Stardrop later that evening; he’d told himself to go home, to get a decent night’s sleep for once, but without fail his feet had carried him over to the saloon instead of the river road out of town to Marnie’s ranch. Gus’ smile had been tight when he’d stomped in just after five, his tone cheerful enough even if the warmth didn’t quite reach his eyes when he’d called a welcome to him. 

Whatever Gus thought privately about his drinking habits, he never turned down his money, and so it was a couple of hours later that he found himself plodding heavily along the road towards home, his wallet significantly lighter and his head a roiling mess of self-loathing and grey fuzziness. He wasn’t even pleasantly drunk, if there was such a thing for him anymore- there was a sweet spot he could hit every now and then, where for a little while he could float along on a blissful bubble of denial, existing only in the moment and untouched by the mountain of his own anxieties. They never vanished, of course, but sometimes if he was lucky enough, he found that place where he could stand apart from them for a time, like he was staring at them through fogged glass. Vague and threatening and close enough that he could almost touch them, but safe at the same time. 

Sadly, he wasn’t in that place right now. Right now he was just drunk, his stomach sloshing about unpleasantly as he walked. The sky was overcast, no stars to light the way home, and as the township vanished behind him the light slowly faded; all he had for company was the wind and his own laboured breathing, his nose stinging from the cold as he stuffed his hands into his pockets. 

So much for spring; Morris had spent all of Tuesday agonising over some stupid floral display at the front of the store, but at this rate any flowers stupid enough to poke their heads out of the ground were gonna get shredded by the storms. He didn’t exactly enjoy stumbling through the dark and the rain on his way to work in the mornings, but he took a petty satisfaction in anything that annoyed his boss. 

He was rounding the last corner in the road before the ranch was due to come into view, the fences lining the road to mark the vast paddocks, when he heard something over the bluster of the wind. He trailed to a halt, blinking into the darkness, trying to work out whether it was just his whiskey sodden brain playing tricks on him or whether there was truly something on the road with him. It was creeping up on midnight, and any critters would’ve been in their beds hours ago to avoid the weather, and he’d passed Leah’s shack about five minutes ago near the river bend. He rubbed at his face, his eyes feeling gritty and tired. 

The sound came again, and he tried not to think about all the crappy horror movies he’d seen in his time. “Hello?” he called dubiously, the word slurred so much that it came out like ‘ _lo_ ’. He squinted into the darkness, pulling his phone out to cast a little bit of light. “Someone there?”

There was a rustling sound to his left, and his heart jumped up into his fucking throat; he only held off on the panicked yelp with extreme effort. He swung around to face the noise, half expecting to come face to face with a serial killer, and the faint light from his phone landed on a bedraggled, miserable looking figure on the other side of the fence. 

The woman from JojaMart. 

If he’d thought she looked bad this morning, it was nothing compared to what she looked like now. She was _drenched_ , her hair dripping and her clothes clinging to her, with mud on her jeans and a twig in her hair. She was hugging her arms around herself desperately, and shivering so violently that she looked- 

Aw, hell. Her lips were the wrong colour, she had goddamn hypothermia. 

She stared at him, and promptly burst into tears. 

Well, this wasn’t how he’d pictured his Wednesday evening going. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked incredulously, staring at her. 

She wasn’t really sobbing so much as shivering and hiccuping, and he had a feeling she’d been crying too much already to manage anything bigger. “I-I was trying to get home,” she stuttered, “but I-I got turned around in the forest and couldn’t find the road, and my phone had no signal, and I-”

“So you just decided to lie down in a field and _die_?” 

Not the most tactful response, and when her face crumbled with misery and humiliation, he felt the edge of his frustrated cynicism falter in tandem. The wind was blowing the damp beginnings of more rain, and his skin felt clammy and revolting- he couldn’t even begin to imagine how awful she felt. He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose, and wishing he didn’t feel alarmingly seasick for someone with their feet on solid ground. “Get out of there,” he said, stepping off the road and over to the fence; he tried to awkwardly make his phone lie on the railing to illuminate them, but gave up and let it lie flat. Hopefully it wouldn’t get too much water in it. He gestured irritably for her to come closer. “Hurry up.” 

She stared at him miserably, as if unsure of what to do; something in his expression must have finally pushed her into a decision, because she lurched forward, stumbling up to the fence until she was opposite him. Her hands were shaking so badly when she reached out to climb over that he winced, fighting back another irritated sigh. “Come on, down and through,” he said, trying to sound encouraging instead of snappish. He crouched slightly, urging her to duck under the top railing and slither through- he didn’t fancy their chances of getting her over the top, not when she was shaking so bad that she looked about to collapse, and he was drunk enough that it was a wonder he was managing coherent sentences. 

She was whimpering as she bent down, and he reached through the fence for her hand; she finally untucked her arms from around herself and took his hand, and her fingers were like icicles. With a little more coaxing, she managed to get her leg through, and then she was fumbling for balance, and then she came slithering through in a rush, only avoiding going face first into the mud because he got his arms under her in time and swung her upright- right into his arms. 

She was fucking _freezing_. Her teeth were chattering, and her eyes weren’t quite focused; the water in her clothes seeped straight through into his, his skin immediately breaking out in goosebumps. 

“Sorry,” she whimpered, shaking badly, “sorry, I’m sorry-”

He righted her with some difficulty, his head a little light from having stood up too quickly. “‘S’alright,” he mumbled, taking a step back once he was sure she wasn’t going to keel over onto her face. 

“I-I was just- I thought, maybe, that I could stay in the hedge, and that would block most of the weather? I just-”

“Where’s home?” he asked bluntly, not really willing to stand around and listen to the whole sob story when it was already midnight and starting to rain and she could very easily die in between now and the end of the tale.

“I-uh...” She swallowed, her eyes going blank for a moment as if she was about to pass out. “Waite Farm.”

Huh. The old abandoned Waite place had someone living in it? He hadn’t heard anything about it- but then again he made it his goal in life to not have anything to do with the town gossip, so for all he knew, Waite Farm could’ve been some goddamn nudist commune and he wouldn’t’ve had a clue. More importantly, though, Waite Farm was a good twenty minute walk from here, if he remembered right, and that was just to the boundary fence at the edge of the ranch. 

She was gonna die of hypothermia long before he got her back there, if she stayed conscious in the first place. The ranch, however...

He gritted his teeth, bracing himself for the cold, and shrugged out of his jacket. “Here,” he said gruffly, draping it around her shoulders. It probably wouldn’t do much good, but he couldn’t in good conscience just leave her standing there shivering. “Can you walk?”

She nodded miserably, still hiccuping and shaking. 

He scooped up his phone, rubbing at his aching head. “This way,” he said, gesturing down the road towards the ranch. After a moment’s hesitation, she started shuffling forward, and he fell into step beside her. The silence between them was awkward, and despite his reluctance to get further involved with this train wreck, he grunted “Got a name?”

She was quiet, and when he glanced at her, she was hugging his jacket tight around her shoulders. She happened to glance at him as well, and he was struck again by how dark her eyes were. 

“Emmy,” she whispered, almost hesitantly. 

The lights of the ranch came into view around the corner- honestly, if she’d walked for another two minutes, she would’ve found help by herself- and instead he nodded, hands stuffed into his pockets. “Emmy,” he said awkwardly, trying to pretend he wasn’t freezing himself. “I’m Shane.”

Marnie had left the lights on for him as she always did, never really comfortable with saying outright that his drinking habits disappointed her but reluctant to try any of the passive aggressive shit that he might’ve expected. He was grateful to her for that, today more than ever, and he just hoped to god that she hadn’t stayed up for him like she sometimes liked to. Last thing he wanted was to have her getting her hopes up over him bringing a girl back, and he sure as hell didn’t want her fussing up a storm and insisting on keeping her for days on end until she recovered. 

He fumbled for his keys a good few times, the drink and the cold making his hands a little unsteady as he tried to get it in the lock. Emmy hovered uncomfortably behind him on the porch, shivering loudly and still whimpering every now and then. He clenched his jaw to stop himself from swearing, and he’d just gotten the key into the door when he heard the tell-tale thud of the latch being thrown from the other side. 

Fuck.

“What time do you call this?” Marnie was already hissing under her breath, a fluffy yellow bathrobe wrapped tight around her as she tugged open the door. “If you made anymore noise you’ll be sure to rouse Jas-”

She gasped. 

If the earth could have opened up and swallowed him whole at that point, that would’ve been just dandy. “Marnie, it’s not what it looks like-” 

“Oh my _stars_ , you poor _girl_ ,” she cried, barrelling past him and knocking him to the side as she charged straight for Emmy. She put her hands on her cheeks and gasped again. “Oh, mercy, what _happened_?”

Emmy was shaking violently, to the point where she seemed incapable of answering, so Shane took it upon himself to respond. “She was-”

“Let’s get you inside and out of these wet things,” Marnie said, wrapping an arm around her shoulders and frogmarching her into the house. 

Shane found himself more than a little irritated at having been dismissed so easily, without even a thank you. “I can run the shower,” he called after them, shuffling into the house.

“You’ll do no such thing, thank you, unless it’s for yourself!” Marnie glared rather pointedly over her shoulder. “I won’t say it won’t do you any good to go sober up, but hot water never did any good to someone with hypothermia. And close that door! The last thing we need is more of that cold air coming into the house.” 

He stood in the doorway, blinking at how quickly the situation had been snatched away from him, and how thoroughly chastised he was feeling, as if Marnie thought it was his fault that Emmy had gone and gotten herself half dead in a paddock. 

“You poor thing,” Marnie was saying, her voice trailing off as the two of them headed deeper into the house, “and with that awful ratty jacket of his, oh dear, it must smell something awful...”

Scowling, he shut the front door, probably with more force than necessary, and yelled “You’re welcome!”

He told himself it was just the cold that made his syllables slur together. 

“Uncle Shane?”

The words were little more than a whisper, hesitant and cringing, and he wanted to just _die_. Bracing himself, he turned towards Jas’ door, where the noise of their entrance had apparently roused her from bed despite the hour and the cold. She was wearing a ratty pair of bunny slippers, filthy and falling apart, and clutching an equally miserable looking bunny against her chest. 

He didn’t like her seeing him drunk- one of the many reasons he was able to rationalise staying late at the saloon, by lying to himself and saying it wouldn’t do Jas any good to see him in this state. If it meant she was upset at him for never being around for bedtime stories or shit like that, well... it was better for her in the long run. 

He rubbed blearily at his face, his skin aching from the cold. “Go back to bed, Jas,” he said, turning his back on her without further elaboration and heading down the hallway to his own room. It was freezing at that end of the house, and he shivered as he tugged the damp shirt up over his head and tossed it into the floor. 

If he listened carefully, he could still hear Marnie fussing over Emmy, the mysterious stranger who lived on an abandoned farm but who slept in empty paddocks in the rain. 

Scowling again, he fumbled through his drawers, pushing aside the socks and the underpants until he found a flask shoved right at the back; he didn’t even bother to sniff it to check what it was, simply upending it into his mouth and emptying it in two swallows. There was a faint touch of heat, but he could’ve been drinking water for all the good it did. 

Kicking off his waterlogged shoes, he couldn’t be assed with the rest; he climbed into bed in his shorts, ignoring the cold and the damp. It was freezing between the sheets anyway, so it wasn't like it made a difference. The rain continued to gust outside, occasionally enough to patter against his window, and he lay there in the dark waiting to see what came first, freezing to death in his own bed or falling asleep. 

Maybe he’d be lucky, and it’d be the former.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woo hoo, I totally don't have the time to commit to another long fic, but when has my creativity ever listened to me before? Never, that's when. 
> 
> Hi SDV fans, I'm poking my toe into the fandom carefully, current plan is to update once a week on Wednesdays (good news is I'm already four chapters in, so I'll be able to stick to it for at least a month). The concept of the first few chapters is courtesy of the fact that I did, in fact, get horrendously lost on my first week in game, and was running around in the woods at midnight frantically trying to work out how to get back to my farm when I ran into Shane. Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy!


	2. Chapter 2

_Several days earlier..._

The bus lurched over a pothole on the winding country road, and Emmy woke from her doze with a squeak, clutching the back of the seat in front of her so tight her knuckles paled. The only other passenger on the bus glanced back at her briefly, but didn’t seem overly concerned. 

Well, that was unnecessarily embarrassing; she eased her grip on the chair and settled back in her own seat, blinking to clear her eyes of sleep. She was lucky that Stardew Valley was the final stop on this line, because knowing her luck she would’ve kept sleeping and woken to find herself halfway to Calico Desert instead of what was supposed to be her new home.

And speaking of- she wasn’t particularly familiar with this part of the state, but it seemed to look a lot like the promotional pictures she’d seen out the outdated Pelican Town tourism website when she’d been making her plans. She could see glimpses of the ocean over the trees as they came down from the mountains, and open fields that seemed to be the beginnings of farmland. 

Farmland. That was gonna be her, soon enough, or at least, she hoped it would. She had absolutely no idea how to run a farm, but at the very least, it was a property far, far away from the city, and far away from her family name. She could be anonymous here, just another face in the crowd- if there were even enough people living here to form a crowd. If worst came to worst and she was absolutely rubbish at this whole farming thing, she could always sell off pockets of the land and use that as an income. 

Besides, how hard could it be? If she’d wanted her every whim indulged and her every need attended to without her ever really needing to try, then she could have stayed in Zuzu City. 

The bus went over another bump in the road, and she clutched her violin case closer. Or, as the terrible reality of her life had proved over these last few months, she could try desperately hard and feel some sense of achievement and pride in her own skills, only to find out later that her parents’ money and influence had actually done all the hard work. This grand plan of hers, to take her grandfather’s old farm and turn it into something that was solely and uniquely hers- it might be a terrible idea in the long run, but right now she needed it. Badly. 

If only to prove to herself that she was worth _something_. 

She pulled her phone from her pocket and checked the time; she’d left Zuzu City before the sun had come up, at the unholy hour of five o’clock, and it was just starting to push towards nine now. She was beginning to wonder how much longer the trip was going to be when the bus began to slow, the driver tugging on the large wheel to bring them into a long section of gravel beside the road. There were no streetlights, no car park- nothing to indicate that this was a bus port. She was about to ask if something was amiss, when the woman pulled the bus to a stop and hauled on the waist high gearstick to set it in park. 

The other passenger was already climbing to their feet, and Emmy stared out the window in dismay. This... this _couldn’t_ be the stop, surely they’d drop her in _town_ if nothing else, not this dirt path in the middle of the forest-

“Pelican Town,” the driver called loudly, staring down the aisle at her. 

Her stomach lurched. 

“Last stop,” the driver said, with a little more emphasis, like she thought Emmy was stupid. 

She wasn’t stupid. Well, she didn’t _think_ she was- she’d thought this was a pretty clever plan, all things considered, but now she was beginning to have doubts. Fumbling to her feet, she clutched her violin case close to her chest and hooked her handbag over her arm, shuffling out into the aisle and down towards the door. 

The other passenger was already wandering off down the trail, waving over their shoulder as if saying goodbye to the bus driver. It wasn’t quite as picturesque as she’d been hoping for- winter had stripped a lot of the trees bare, and the new growth hadn’t come in heavily yet. There was a bleakness to it all that she hadn’t been expecting, too many bare branches and too many muddy patches of ground from the rains, not enough greenery and flowers and sunshine. 

But it was supposed to be a fresh start, and what was more fresh than the new growth of spring... the air smelled good, at least. Brisk and sharp and clean. 

The driver ambled past her and tugged open the undercarriage of the bus, pulling out her lone suitcase amongst the tarps and spare wheels. Emmy winced when she set it on the ground, trying not to think of the mud staining the- you know what, it didn’t matter how much it cost. That was the point of moving here, to start over without the looming spectre of her parents’ money hanging over her. 

But when the driver turned and went to go back towards the door, all of her optimism and all of her self-assuredness- which admittedly, was not high to begin with- abruptly vanished in a panic. “Um.” She pulled up the handle on the suitcase so that she could roll it along behind her. The little wheels were designed for the smooth tiled interiors of airports, not the muddy gravel of the countryside, and it was bogged within seconds. “Excuse me?”

The woman turned back to her, a cigarette already in her hand. “This ain’t a taxi service, sweetheart,” she said, her tightly curled hair the brassy kind of blonde that could only come from a bottle. 

“Oh, no, um, I didn’t mean-” She stumbled on a larger rock in the gravel. “I’m looking to get to Waite Farm? Can you tell me how to get there?” 

There was a moment of silence as the woman assessed her, taking a long drag on the cigarette, and then she started chuckling. “Get outta here,” she said, coughing with the practiced ease of a multi pack a day smoker, “you’re old Alfie’s kiddie?” 

She felt her face heat, and she glanced away nervously; she hadn’t really wanted anyone to recognise her so quickly, and she hadn’t really planned on what to say. “Um-”

“Well, grandkiddie I guess, looking at you,” the woman said, continuing without any input from her. “Shit, I heard the old dog had family, I ain’t never seen them though.”

Emmy relaxed marginally. She didn’t know. 

The woman dropped the cigarette on the ground and stubbed it out with her boot. “Take the right path there, follow it along a ways,” she said, her drawl broad and not quite comforting. Extroverted, but not friendly, maybe that was the way to word it. Her older brother Gareth was like that. “Don’t go taking any forks in the road or shit, stick to the main track. The ol’ Waite place is about ten, maybe fifteen minutes down that way.” 

Emmy blinked, her eyes widening slowly. “Fifteen minutes _walk_?” she said in distress, glancing down at her outfit. She was wearing jeans and a cashmere sweater, with nothing more than a pair of sleek white loafers. It was a comfortable outfit for travelling, but was absolutely not suitable for dragging a suitcase through the mud for fifteen minutes. 

The woman cackled- actually _cackled_ , like some kind of fairy tale villain. “Spring air’ll do you good, missy,” she said, climbing back onto the bus. She closed the door directly on Emmy’s face, and a moment later the engine started with a loud rumble. Emmy squeaked and backed up, but not before a splatter of mud landed over her legs as the bus pulled away from the parking stop and took off down the road, leaving her in a cloud of diesel smoke and misery. 

She wasn’t going to cry, she wasn’t going to cry. She tried to tell herself that the morning wasn’t a total loss, that nothing was particularly terrible- just unexpected-, but she wasn’t really making any convincing arguments. As a distraction, she pulled her phone out of her pocket again and clicked through to her emails, pulling up the last one from Cheryl, her lawyer. Cheryl had been the one to find the old estate entitlements in the first place, quietly making arrangements for her to take full ownership of the title deeds her grandfather had left for her years ago, and Cheryl had been the one to organise a meeting this morning with the town mayor and what passed for their civic planner out at the farm. 

Sniffing, she wiped her face on the back of her sleeve and stuffed her phone away. She had a plan. She had a time frame. The day was young, and she had made it safely, and everything else was just... it was just character building. That’s all it was. 

With no other direction to go but forward, she tugged on the suitcase until the muck in the wheels dislodged, and began to drag it in the direction of her grandfather’s farm. 

Emmy had never seen her grandfather’s farm. In fact, she’d never seen any farm, ever. It wasn’t the sort of environment considered appropriate for the daughter of one of Zuzu City’s oldest and most prestigious families. The yearly Black and White Gala, that was suitable, as were the various charity functions that her mother hosted now that she was technically retired. The Gold Box that her father’s company owned at the Tunneler’s home stadium, that was suitable, as long as one or both of her brothers had been there to deter any drunken advances against her. 

A filthy farm, out in the country, far away from anywhere that might have suitable internet download speeds? _Unthinkable_. 

Hopefully that meant that none of them would think to look for her here. 

She hobbled down the dirt track, her suitcase thudding awkwardly through the mud behind her; her shoes were not designed for heavy outdoor use, and it only took a few minutes before the hobbling became more pronounced as her heels began to blister. She gritted her teeth, her arms aching from carrying all her bags, and kept going. 

_Come on, Emmy_ , she told herself firmly. _This is your fresh start. No crying._

It felt like an eternity, but eventually she came around a bend in the road and almost whimpered aloud at the sight of a worn, weatherbeaten sign hanging from a tree that read ‘ _Waite Farm_ ’ in elegant cursive. A little further past the tree, the road opened up onto an overgrown field, with a small cottage perhaps a hundred paces from the treeline. 

There were two distant figures by the cottage, and as she drew closer she could see that one of them was an elderly gentleman and the other was a woman of middle years, who was currently working hard to... remove some ivy from the side of the house? 

“And here’s the lady herself!” The elderly gentleman, wearing a bright green pair of overalls and a pair of mud caked rubber boots, came carefully down the steps, which creaked warningly beneath his weight. She had a moment of jealousy for his far more sensible footwear, thinking miserably of how her own were most certainly ruined, but she managed a tentative smile. “You would be Miss Emmy, I expect?”

“I expect you would be right,” she said, attempting to be humorous. 

“I’m Mayor Lewis, I believe we spoke in those electronic mails,” he said, “and this here is Robin, she’s our resident architect, carpenter, electrician, oh- you name it. Just an all rounder sort, does all kind of odd jobs around the township.”

The woman had long red hair that she’d tied back in a messy ponytail, with a few streaks of white at the temples; she had a smattering of freckles over her face, proof of a life spent predominantly outdoors, and as she approached she pulled off a pair of thick work gloves, tucking them into her shirt pocket and holding out a hand with a smile. “Robin Miller-Baptiste, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said; when Emmy tried to reach out to take the handshake, her handbag slid down her arm and crunched into her violin case. “Oh, goodness, look at me standing about here with you all buried under all these bags. Let me help you there, dear.”

Robin promptly took the violin case and the handbag, before Emmy could even open her mouth to object. 

“You know, it’s so good to see someone bringing life back to the old place,” Robin continued, apparently chatty despite the lack of input from her, “Alfie was always such a dear, and it was so heartbreaking when we lost him- oh, but listen to me, it must have been so much harder for all of you, of course, I’m just sorry you couldn’t have come back while the place was still in it’s prime.” 

Emmy looked up at the cottage- and her heart fell into her shoes. 

The house looked as dilapidated as the fields, the shutters hanging on crookedly to the windows while the narrow porch sagged over the far end. There was ivy growing wild up the side of the door, and the paint was peeling from the walls. It was tiny, and rundown, and very clearly abandoned for some time now. It scarcely looked fit for habitation. 

But Robin was still talking. “I know it’s a little rough around the edges right now, but a few weeks of work and some elbow grease and we’ll have the place looking good as new again,” she said excitedly, ushering Emmy up the steps and into the house. 

It was decidedly a bad decision- if anything, the inside of the house was worse than outside, with the layer of dead leaves piled up just inside the door, and the thick layer of dust lying across the furniture. It was a single room, illuminated by an ancient bulb hanging from the ceiling, without even a lamp shade, and there was most definitely a smell of animals, as if something had been nesting in the floor over the cold of the winter. 

There was a bed, a chest, a table with two chairs, and a pot bellied stove that one of them had apparently taken the liberty of lighting. That was _it_. 

Emmy promptly burst into tears. 

“Oh! Oh, goodness, is it- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...” Robin fluttered helplessly beside her, as if unsure whether to hug her or run for the door. “I think I’ve misread this badly.” 

But Lewis had apparently been expecting just such a reaction, if his calm sigh was anything to go by. “Robin, my dear, perhaps you’d be so good as to see about getting young Maru or Sebastian to run back with some fresh linens, just something so we can get young miss Emmy settled for tonight? I’ll stay in the meantime, keep our guest company.” 

Robin looked between them uncertainly, clearly distressed at having upset Emmy, but after a moment she nodded. “Of course. I’m sure there’s a few other things I can wrangle up, I’ll get some non perishables and see about getting the camp shower out of storage-”

“There’s no shower?” Emmy whispered, horrified.

Robin patted her on the arm. “I’ll go find that camp shower,” she said, putting down the violin case and the handbag on the dusty floor. Emmy tried not to whimper thinking about how close her violin was to that filth. 

Neither she nor Lewis said anything further as she made her way from the house, and once she was outside, Robin started whistling. Actually whistling, like some sort of cheerful children’s cartoon; the sound slowly vanished into the distance, and Emmy was left standing there whimpering and hiccuping, covered in mud and wondering what exactly she’d gotten herself into. 

Lewis pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and carefully wiped down the table, then did the same for both of the chairs; Emmy stiffened for a moment when he took her by the shoulders, but she didn’t have the strength to make a fuss, so she let him lead her to the chair to sit down. She was still sniffing as he pottered about, pushing open the shutters to let the sunshine in, and going over to the chest on the floor; when he turned back to the table, he had a pair of tin mugs in his hand, and he set them down between them.

He surprised her further by pulling a thermos from the large pouch on the front of his overalls. “Tea?” he asked, unscrewing the lid. 

Emmy blinked at him, still sniffing back the last of the tears. “Oh, uh... I guess? Maybe?” 

“I take mine with a little milk, I hope you don’t mind,” he said, pouring the deep brown liquid out between the two mugs. “Good for the bones, you know.” 

He settled into the other chair with a contented sigh, nodding to her to take one of the mugs. After a moment’s hesitation she did, holding it in both hands and letting the warmth seep into her as she stared down into the drink; Lewis took a loud drink, smacking his lips appreciatively as if it was the finest beverage he’d ever tasted. “So, missy,” he said, and she winced at the tone. He knew who she was, she’d known that before she arrived. She’d just hoped... well. She wasn’t sure what she’d hoped for. “I’m guessing that you must be little miss Emilia, that Alfie used to speak so fondly of.” 

She stared into the tea, hoping that if she concentrated hard enough, she’d find the strength not to cry again. 

“Now, if I’m remembering correctly, you’d be the third child, yes? Born to Evelyn and Anthony?” 

She bit the inside of her cheek. “You already know who I am,” she said quietly, “so there’s no need for the charade of asking after me.” 

“Hmm, indulge an old man- I don’t like to be presumptive.” He took another sip of tea, just as loudly as the first. “How is Evelyn, by the way? Alfie always did talk about her like she’d hung the stars in the sky. Never did see a father more proud than he was.” 

Closing her eyes, she put the mug back on the table. “If it’s all the same to you, mayor, I’d rather not talk about them right now.” 

“Figured there had to be a story there, given that Abby’s folk went so far out of their way to make sure none of you ever had any reason to want to come back out here,” he said, sighing forlornly. “Quite frankly, I’d come to terms with the fact that the place was gonna sit empty forever, so it came as quite a surprise when your assistant got in contact.”

“Lawyer,” she said quietly. “Cheryl is my lawyer.” 

“And it’s strange enough that a young lady like you should need one of those in the first place.”

Emmy very badly wanted a long, hot bath, and a decent breakfast instead of the gas station egg roll she’d eaten hours ago, and she very much wanted to be left alone. “It’s sort of a necessity, given my family.” 

He chuckled. “The D’Arbyshires never did do things by half, I’ll give you that,” he said. He drained the last of his tea, and she tried not to feel guilty for not touching hers. “Alfie used to tell me the stories, the parties they threw on the estate, the extravagance of it all-”

“It’s the old story, though, isn’t it?” she said, laughing hollowly. “Girl meets boy, girl loves boy, girl runs off with boy, girl’s rich and powerful family objects vehemently, girl’s family pay exorbitant amounts of money to bury relationship, girl moves on, girl spends the next sixty years of her life bitterly referring to the whole affair as a childish lapse of shallow whimsy and passing her resentment onto her children and grandchildren.” 

Lewis was silent, and if the floor had cracked open to swallow her whole in that moment, she would have been ecstatic. Finally the old man sighed. “I was just a young man when Alfie brought Abby home with him,” he said, pushing a dusty picture frame that she’d missed across the table towards her, “scarcely more than a boy myself, really. But I do remember quite clearly, even for all the years that have passed in between, that they were happy here.”

Emmy picked up the picture, her heart lurching a little to see a young man and a young woman smiling up at her in sepia tones. They looked blissfully happy, like they’d been in the middle of laughing at a joke when the picture had been taken, and the woman’s features looked almost eerily like her own. The dark eyes, the dark curly hair, the wide smile. 

In all her life, she couldn’t remember ever seeing her grandmother smile.

She bowed her head. “They were married for less than three months,” she said, putting the picture back down so she didn’t have to look at it.

“Three months can be a lifetime, if you’ll let it be,” he said, and then chuckled. “Listen to me, a hopeless old romantic. I suppose what I mean to say, Emmy my girl, is that this place was full of life once, and love too. Your grandfather was a man with a heart as big as the hills, and this home, this farm- they’re imbued with everything that was good in him. Everything he believed in.” 

The words were bitter, and a tad cruel, but she couldn’t help herself. “A crumbling wreck in the middle of an overgrown field, that’s all his life amounted to.” 

Lewis was quiet, and she knew she’d hurt him, but she didn’t have the strength to explain herself and apologise right now. “The building might be a shell,” he said quietly, “and the land might be tangled with weeds, but there’s a heart here, girl. And that heart is you. You’ve got your grandfather’s heart in you, else you wouldn’t have come running here when you needed sanctuary.” He shifted in the chair, the rubber boots creaking with the movement. “Unless you want to think of it was coincidence that you chose to run back to the place where his memory was strongest when you needed someplace safe to hide?” 

She didn’t want to answer that. 

“So, I’m guessing it’d be in everyone’s best interest not to call you Miss D’Arbyshire-”

“Please don’t,” she said urgently, the words whipping out of her. It felt too much like cowardice, running away from who she was, but she didn’t want to be that person anymore. 

“-then I’d guess you’d be wanting to go by Emilia Waite? After your grandfather?” 

She looked around the cottage- really, it was more of a shack, her parents’ estate back in Zuzu City had better _sheds_ than this- and tried to concentrate on the fact that she had freedom. She had a new life, a new opportunity, and this was no great hardship in the grand scheme of things.

“Emmy,” she said. “I’m going to be Emmy Waite.”

____

By Wednesday, she was sorely regretting her decision to soldier onwards. 

It was raining, and the roof was leaking. She’d found enough pots and cups to catch the drips, but it meant the floor was a bit of a minefield to navigate. There was no plumbing inside the cottage, but there was a tap on the outside of the building, near the crumbling wood pile, and whenever she needed water for anything, she had to dash outside with a pot, fill it up, and then take it back inside to boil.

Robin had promised her she could get her indoor plumbing in the next week, and the novelty of it all was wearing off fast. 

She’d spent all of Monday cleaning the cottage, but the animal smell still lingered; Lewis had suggested that there might be something rotting under the floorboards, but there was not enough money in the world that could convince Emmy to climb under the house, and definitely not in pursuit of a dead animal. She’d done what she could to brighten the place regardless, and it was nice to see what a difference it made having clean sheets on the bed and her own meagre belongings spread out over the table and the walls. It felt like an achievement.

Tuesday had been spent outdoors, faced with the daunting task of where to actually start in the process of turning the weed-ridden fields into some kind of productive farm. She’d cleared a decent sized square in front of the cottage, with all the branches and brambles piled up near to the road back to town. Did they have any sort of garbage collection around here? What was she supposed to do with all the unwanted, er, _bits_? 

She was aching and miserable and sore, and the rain on Wednesday had been a blessed relief, despite the leaking roof. A day to go through her things and recover from the day before, to start making a proper inventory of things she’d need and a budget to organise it all, to respond to the emails from Cheryl; she very pointedly did not go onto any of usual gossip websites while she was on her laptop, because the last thing she wanted to see was any speculation about the absence of one of Zuzu City’s darlings. 

After some deliberation on her part, she cleaned the picture frame of her grandparents and put the picture back up on the window sill. She found a brittle old newspaper clipping in the back of the frame, the article taken from an ancient issue of the Pelican Town Gazette- it had been a short announcement about the wedding of Alfonse Waite and Abigail D’Arbyshire, an event which had apparently been the absolute delight of the township. 

She didn’t know how to reconcile that- and the delightfully happy couple in the old, faded picture- with the severe, bitter woman she’d known all her life as Grandmother, or ma’am. Abigail had never been a loving woman, and certainly not one prone to laughter, both traits that she had passed down to her children. Evelyn, Emmy’s mother and Abigail’s daughter, would never be a woman Emmy could describe as warm-hearted either. 

What would things have been like, if she’d grown up here in the valley? If her grandmother had stayed, if the marriage hadn’t been torn apart by a family who couldn’t abide the thought of their eligible heiress daughter marrying the _gardener_. Well, Evie would never have married Anthony Callaway, for one thing, so _she_ would never have been born. All pointless speculation, really. 

But it made her wonder.

When she went outside to refill the pot of water to reboil, fidgeting at the blustering wind blowing the rain under the porch, the day began to take a turn for the worse. As she stood there hopping from foot to foot and shivering in the cold, there was an ominous creak from the beams above her; that was all the warning she had before the porch roof collapsed inwards, rotting leaves and freezing water dumped directly on top of her. 

She screamed, the water running down her back and the slimy leaves seeming to touch her everywhere at once. She all but threw herself back inside, trying to shake off all the leaves and the water and failing miserably at both. By the time she’d stopped panicking she was crying, standing just about on top of the stove as she tried to pick the leaves from her hair with shaking hands. “Stupid stupid,” she hiccuped, scowling miserably as she cried. “Stupid girl and a stupid plan, and a stupid house and stupid- _stupid!_ ”

There was a towel in the things Robin had sent over for her, and she tried to dry herself furiously, peeling off the sodden clothing and draping it over the furniture around the stove. Shivering, she tried to go through her purse for her anxiety meds, her hands shaking badly from the cold and her rising wave of miserable panic; she got the strip out, trying to pop a tablet from the foil seal, and-

-and she dropped it. Not the tablet, but the _whole foil strip_ , the entirety of her prescription and she watched in horror as they fell in slow motion, bouncing once on the floor as she tried to grab for them, and then... then straight through a gap between the floorboards, vanishing into the space under the house. 

Emmy stood there for a very long time, staring in horrified silence at the tiny gap that had swallowed her safety net, her only means of control when her head got too loud for her. Here she was, in a strange house, with no friends and no family, and now no ativan, and she was... she was... 

Utterly, terrifyingly alone. 

After a long, long time, she dressed silently in a dry set of clothes and reached for her umbrella. She’d seen a general store in town on Monday, so she’d just have to brave the rain and just... do her best. 

She could manage that. Surely.


	3. Chapter 3

_Back on the ranch..._

Shane had hit that uncomfortable part of waking up, where your brain is starting to kick into gear but hasn’t quite reached full consciousness- the place where you could feel how full your bladder was or feel how badly your shoulder was aching from sleeping at a bad angle, but weren’t quite awake enough to do anything about it but wallow in the discomfort. He had both problems, and his nose was fucking freezing outside of the blankets, and he was really sorely regretting climbing into bed last night with damp shorts on. 

He felt disgusting, and as he came out of the depths of sleep and up towards wakefulness, he couldn’t have been more frustrated with the fact that he was, in fact, awake and alive. 

He wanted to pull the blankets back up over his head and sleep for a thousand years, anything to escape the grey monotony and seething morass of self-loathing waiting for him the moment he committed to waking up. 

But his bladder, at least, would not be denied, and despite the fact that his alarm hadn’t gone off yet, he groaned and slithered out from between the blankets. He sat on the edge of the bed for a good long minute, head in his hands as he waited to see if the headache was just the result of last night’s drinking or whether his brain was trying to kill him again. Or, you know, maybe he’d be lucky and sleeping in wet clothes might’ve given him pneumonia, and he might just die without having to really think about it. 

The room stopped throbbing after a moment, the walls quaking in time to his pulse as his headache settled, and with a grunt he stumbled to his feet, wobbling slightly. He snared his dressing gown- a tattered old tartan affair-, off of the back of the door and tugged it on over his shoulders, not bothering to tie it up or tug it closed as he pulled open the bedroom door, rubbing vigorously at his eye as he tried to catalogue how to say the least amount of words humanly possibly to Marnie when he ran past her in the hallway. 

Except that that wasn’t what happened. 

The first thing he noticed was the smell- not the light, because it wasn’t unusual for Marnie to be up this early or earlier, trundling about the ranch to visit and feed all the animals before sunup, leaving the lights on in the kitchen. It was quite normal for him to stagger off to work in the mornings still groggily trying to come awake while the house was cheerfully lit behind him. But the smell... the unmistakeable smell of bacon, and eggs, and something sweet that smelled like- maple syrup? Maybe? 

Marnie wasn’t one for big breakfasts, and it was too early for Jas to be up to get ready for her classes with Penny, so what-

He stepped into the kitchen, frowning in confusion, and promptly wished that the sun would explode and end him in the subsequent apocalypse. Because sitting at the table across from where Marnie was pottering about at the stove, staring at him in wide eyed dismay, was the woman from last night. The woman from the paddock. From JojaMart.

Shit, Emmy, that was it. 

Her hair _was_ curly, like he’d thought yesterday, and it was fluffy enough this morning that it was like some kind of fuzzy halo around her head. Her skin was a soft brown, now that he wasn’t looking at her under the ghastly fluorescent lights of JojaMart or the equally draining light of his phone, and she had a smattering of freckles over her nose. She was clutching a cup of coffee in both of her hands, leaning both elbows on the table as if she belonged here in the house, comfortable as you please, except that she was staring, and he-

He was half naked, the robe gaping open over his hairy chest and uncomfortably chubby belly, and his hair askew from the pillow. He probably still had a line of drool on his face. 

Fuck. 

“Oh, Shane, there you are.” Marnie was apparently making pancakes, if the smell coming from the stove was any indication. The table itself already held a plate overflowing with strips of crispy bacon and fried eggs and little triangles of toast lovingly buttered, but apparently that wasn’t enough for the thirteen hundred people she must have been expecting with all that food. “I wasn’t sure if we’d woken you or not.” 

Emmy was still staring at him, and he felt his anxiety spike through the roof; with jerky, uneasy movements, he pulled his robe closed, tucking his arms around himself to keep it closed. “Uh,” he grunted, for lack of anything better to say. 

“Now, I know you’ve got work this morning, but I was hoping you’d be able to do young Emmy here a favour on your way in,” she said, apparently either unconcerned by his mood or unaware of his discomfort. “It’s early enough that I thought you might be able to walk her up to Waite farm, show her the trails and such, so we don’t have this kind of near disaster again. You’d be a good boy and do that, now, wouldn’t you Shane?” 

It was too early for conversation- especially conversation that required him to think and provide input. He blinked at Marnie, trying to put her words into a logical order. “Uh-”

“Wonderful, thank you dear. Oh, but look at you, you really should probably shower first and clean up, breakfast will still be waiting for you, there’s plenty of it, I promise.” 

Emmy was _still staring at him_.

He jerked his hand vaguely behind him. “Bathroom,” he said, the only word he could convince his mouth to say, and before Marnie could say anything to humiliate him any further- although he was managing that pretty fucking fantastically all on his own- he turned and lunged for the hallway. He got the door closed behind him- slammed it closed, really- and made it to the toilet just as his stomach rebelled, dropping to his knees and clutching the top of the cistern as he did his best to vomit quietly. He was actually pretty good at it, all things considered; too much practice at it. 

Hopefully Marnie would be too busy chatting and cooking to hear him anyway. 

When he finally felt the last of the painful cramping ease off, he shuddered and wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, pressing the flush as he stumbled to his feet. He downed a glass of water, grimacing at the way it sloshed about in his now empty stomach, and then dropped his robe and his shorts into a puddle on the floor before climbing into the shower. 

His head was thudding unpleasantly as he stood beneath the spray, eyes closed as he prayed desperately for the water to either soothe the ache or dissolve him into tiny granules that could slip away down the drain. When neither option appeared to be coming to pass, he fumbled instead for the soap, trying to make the minimal effort required to turn into a functioning human being- or at least, a creature that could pass as one. 

Ah, fuck, he should’ve brought a change of clothes in here with him, now he had to shuffle back through the kitchen again in nothing but a robe. Well, come to think of it, it wasn’t like anyone had warned him before he’d walked out of his bedroom, so honestly it was their fault that he had to look so inappropriate. 

Dunking his head under the water and aggressively scrubbing at his face, he reached blindly for the tap and tried to tell his anxiety to shut the hell up. 

It didn’t really listen. 

Now why the hell would Marnie think it was a good idea for him to walk this girl home? Was she trying to scare her off entirely, throwing the worst Pelican Town had to offer at her so that she ran screaming back to wherever it was that she'd come from? It wasn’t like Marnie couldn’t take an hour out of her day to walk her back, but _no_ , apparently _he_ had to leave the house in the dark and the cold because he had to be a _gentleman_.

He pulled the robe back on before he was fully dry, stalking from the bathroom without bothering to shave. He was gonna look like shit today no matter what he did, so he could either save the physical and mental energy that grooming himself required and use it for something else, or he could waste it and attempt it and have Morris yell at him anyway.

He kept his head down as he marched through the kitchen and back to his bedroom, ignoring the cheerful question Marnie threw after him; something about a reminder about Emmy.

As if he was going to _forget_. 

Maybe there was still time to call in sick today, maybe he could just crawl back into bed and ignore everything outside of his room, maybe- 

“Shane? Hurry up dear!”

Maybe if he feigned sickness, Marnie wouldn’t fucking well leave him alone all day, and the one thing he could count on if he left the house was that no one would fuss over him. 

He rummaged through the clothes strewn across the room for a clean Joja shirt, holding them all up to his face to smell to see if they passed the Stank Test. He found the one that smelled the least bad and tugged it on, fumbling around in the near dark of his room for the rest of his clothing; he hesitated when he couldn’t find his hoodie, realising a moment later with a stone in his belly that he’d last seen it draped around _her_ trembling shoulders. 

Well, fuck. 

Gritting his teeth, he tried to ignore the headache as he marched determinedly out into the kitchen again, deliberately not making eye contact as he stopped in front of the table. Marnie was sitting across from Emmy now, a large pitcher of some kind of juice between them; Marnie visibly brightened at his reappearance, and he pretended not to notice as he grabbed a few pieces of toast and wedged a fried egg between them. 

“I’ve still got pancake batter, if you-”

“Do you know where my jacket is?” he asked, around a mouthful of toast and egg. It’d be better with a copious helping of chilli jam, but the less time he had to spend in the house the better, and Marnie would start listing off all the dozens of things she could offer him for breakfast if he didn’t make his escape soon. 

The hesitation in the air was palpable, and he could just about feel the awkward looks between Marnie and their guest. Finally, Marnie sighed. “I left it to dry by the fire,” she said, “I’ll just check on it for you.” 

He grunted in response, chewing on the makeshift sandwich as if it was the only thing worthy of his attention. Marnie drifted from the room after a long moment’s hesitation, as if she was expecting more input from him, and then it was just him and the new girl. She didn’t make any effort to speak to him either, nervously pushing the last of her breakfast around on her plate; the scraping of the fork irritated the fuck out of him, far more than it should have, but he was hungover and tired and cold and possibly getting sick, and didn’t have the mental energy required to tiptoe around her delicate constitution. “Do you have to do that?” he asked flatly, and the sound stopped instantly.

“Sorry,” she whispered, the first thing she’d said that morning in his company.

He was spared any further attempts at conversation as Marnie came bustling back into the room, holding his jacket up between her hands with a frown on her face. “I hope it’s dry enough, but I do wish you’d ask your manager for a new one- I’m worried it’ll come apart in the next wash.”

He took it and shrugged it over his shoulders before she could further her critiques of his outfit. “It’s comfy,” he muttered, picking up the remains of his sandwich and popping it into his mouth. “You ready to go?”

The question came out rather garbled, muffled by the food in his mouth, and Marnie frowned at him. But the expected scolding about his manners never came, as she instead turned back to Emmy. “I’ll get your clothes dropped back to you later today once they’re dry,” she said, with all the warmth she didn’t offer to Shane. “And would you like some food to take with you? I hate to think of you up in that rickety old place without even good food to sustain you.”

She kept talking, but Shane zoned out, focussed instead on the first part of her monologue. _I’ll get your clothes back to you_. But she was dressed, she was sitting there at the table looking poised and elegant and _holy fuck wait was that his shirt_?

“That’s mine,” he blurted out, cutting Marnie off mid word. “My shirt, I mean. Why are you wearing my shirt?”

Marnie made a tsking sound, as if scolding him, while Emmy had meanwhile gone wide-eyed and white-knuckled as she stared at the tabletop. “Of course it’s your shirt, you silly boy, what else was she supposed to wear? Her things were covered in mud and needed a good wash, and it’s not like she stood a chance of keeping any of my things on,” she said with a chuckle, patting her hands on her belly. “Slender little thing like she is, even _your_ things are swimming on her- she wouldn’t have stood a chance with one of my old frocks.”

“But it’s my-”

“Oh, enough boy,” she said crossly. “What, are you twelve again, terrified of catching cooties and too rude to share?”

“I’m sorry,” Emmy whispered again, a little louder than before.

“Don’t you go apologising for Mister Grumpy Pants here-”

“Marnie!”

“Well, Shane, sweetheart, don’t go carrying on like a child and I won’t treat you like one.” She barely came past his chin, but he still felt a ferocious need to cower as she rather forcefully straightened his collar and tugged at his shirt in a hopeless attempt to make it look less creased. She sighed in an exaggerated manner, the sound rife with disappointment, and he stared sullenly ahead and ignored it. “Alright. Best be on your way, then, if you want to make good time to work.”

That was a laughable notion if ever he’d heard one. 

He scooped up his keys and his wallet, tucking them inside his jacket pocket; his phone was already in his shorts, and thankfully it didn’t seem to be any worse for wear from the adventures in the rain last night. As he wasted time in the front room, he could hear Emmy and Marnie talking in the kitchen still. 

“It’s just- he really doesn’t like me,” Emmy was saying in a pleading voice. 

“Shane doesn’t really like anyone, sweetheart, you’re fine.”

“I’m really sure I can find my way home now-”

“Nonsense, it’s no trouble at all.” He rolled his eyes; of course it was no trouble for her, seeing as she hadn’t volunteered herself for the task. “He’ll get you home safe, and we’ll see you later in the week, okay? You just get yourself safe first, worry about those clothes after.”

“Thank you Marnie,” she said, and Shane unkindly made a face and mouthed the words to himself. “If there’s anything I can do to make up for your kindness-”

“Oh, don’t you worry about me, it was my pleasure.” He heard them coming, and schooled his features back to something more neutral; judging by the way Marnie scowled at him, he hadn’t exactly succeeded. “Now, you’ve got my number now, so if there’s anymore troubles, you don’t hesitate to call, you hear me?”

Emmy seemed to be abysmally embarrassed, something that Marnie just wasn’t picking up on, if the way she stared so determinedly at the ground was anything to go by; she had one arm across her torso, clinging to her other elbow as if she was hugging herself. “Yes, Marnie,” she said quietly, still almost a whisper. 

Whatever. He didn’t have time for Little Miss Introvert to find her tongue. 

He pulled open the front door, wincing a little at the early morning sunlight as it broke over the top of the ridge to the east. “Bye,” he said tersely, not bothering to look back, or to see whether Emmy was following him. 

The clay path crunched under his feet as he skirted the puddles, following the fence towards the edge of the ranch instead of taking the path along the river to town. There was a heavy mist still hanging over the fields, and the sun was lancing through it in solid golden beams; the trees were still mostly bare from winter, and it all looked quite surreal and not quite earthly, like if he took one wrong step he’d be in a place not of this world anymore. Which was ridiculous, of course, and he didn’t believe in such nonsense, but still. It was nice. 

Right up until Emmy came jogging up beside him, her breath coiling out in front of her in the chilly morning air as she hurried to keep pace with him. 

_Ugh._

“You don’t have to walk me,” she started to say, and he jammed his hands into his pockets.

“Well, I am.”

“Yes, but I said you don’t have to.” 

“And I said I am!” God, he didn’t warm to people just in general, but she seemed to go out of her way to get under his skin and drive him up the wall. “Let’s just- let’s just get this over with.”

They walked in silence for precisely ten seconds before her self control broke and she spoke again. “I’m sorry,” she said, for what felt like the millionth time.

He took a deep breath, glancing up at the clouds for strength. “For the love of Yoba, please stop _apologising_.” 

“I was just- I thought, in the movies, when people are trapped outside, they always say to find shelter, so I-”

“I really don’t care why you were lying in our horse paddock at midnight-”

She let out a frustrated sort of- squeak? It took him by surprise, so much so that he forgot he was sulking in order to stare at her. “Stop interrupting me!” she snapped, her cheeks flushed and her shoulders hunched where she had her arms wrapped around herself. “Why does everyone in this backwater think it’s okay to just- just do that!” 

He blinked, startled. Okay, he had been interrupting her, now that he thought about it, and that wasn’t a decent thing to do, but- _ugh_. Just what he fucking needed, a lesson in manners. 

“Sorry,” he grunted, looking back down to the road. She didn’t say anything else, and he didn’t offer any further attempts at conversation, so they passed the time in uncomfortable silence. The sun rose higher as they walked, glinting off the dew in the grass, and the fog had begun to dissipate by the time they crossed the border between the ranch and the farm. 

You could tell straight away that they’d left Marnie’s property, the grass immediately overgrown and strewn with unseen obstacles like rotting logs and half-buried rocks. The trees were thick, but there was the vague hint of a path winding between them, so he took the lead and hoped to Yoba that any cobwebs hanging across the path would at least have the decency of having dew on them, so he didn’t walk face first into them. 

They skirted around the edge of a pond, finally breaking out of the trees and into an open field that lived down to his expectations- there was a dilapidated looking shack sitting a couple of hundred metres away, and there was some evidence that someone had tried to clear the brush around it, but otherwise... sheesh. Not a good look. 

“Nice place,” he said, and out of the corner of his eye he saw her stiffen. 

“It’s going to be better,” she said quietly, and with enough doubt in her voice that it was obvious she didn’t believe it either. 

“Uh huh,” he said, coming to a stop before the crumbling porch- one end of it had collapsed, the porch covered in dead leaves and water. Damn, she was braver than he’d thought, willingly living here. That or dumber than he’d thought. “Well, that’s that, I should get going to work-”

“I’ll get your clothes back to you,” she said quickly, staring fixedly at the ground; it was harder to tell with the soft brown of her skin, but he thought she was blushing. “I’m sorry she gave them to me without asking you first.”

He rubbed at his face; this was really way more conversation than he was comfortable with before eight o’clock in the morning. “It’s fine,” he said, waving vaguely towards her, “whatever.”

He left it at that, already uncomfortable and not wanting to draw it out with long, awkward goodbyes. There was a sound behind him as if she’d meant to call out after him, but when he glanced back over his shoulder she’d gone inside the house. Definitely braver than he gave her credit for. 

It was only when he was halfway down the road to town, passing the bus stop back to Zuzu City, when he realised he could smell something sweet. Something soft. He was about to write it off as maple syrup, that maybe there’d been some spilled on the table at breakfast and he’d put a hand in it, when he breathed in again and came to the conclusion that it was coming from the jacket. 

_What the...?_

He stuck his nose into the fabric and inhaled deeply, and the soft sweetness came through stronger- and that’s when it hit him. He’d given his hoodie to Emmy last night in the road, when she’d been shivering from the cold. It was _her_ he could smell on his jacket. 

That was a little more intimate than he was hoping for this early in the morning. 

Scowling, he tugged on it until the collar was well and truly clear of his face, pointedly breathing through his mouth so he couldn’t accidentally smell it again, and hurried down the road to work. 

He was half an hour early when he got there, nodding to Jane as she stood in the loading bay out back with a cigarette before they opened. There was a Joja truck in the loading bay, and Sam was rather exuberantly dancing as he wheeled the pallets into the storeroom, the cords on his headset swinging wildly. How did he have so much energy this early in the morning? It was unnatural. 

He snared a box of spicy pizza pockets from the freezer storage on his way to the break room, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Morris hadn’t spotted him helping himself to the stock again. There was blandly forgettable rock music playing over the store speakers even though they weren’t open yet, and the fluorescent lights were already giving him a headache- well, worse of a headache. He unloaded the pizza pockets onto a plate and dumped them all in the microwave, watching them turn slowly while he debated whether or not to risk the coffee machine in the break room. 

He heard the shuffling of dancing footsteps, and the odd grunts and humming of someone singing under their breath, and he tried not to roll his eyes as Sam pretended to moonwalk into the room. “Yo, yo, yo, Mister Reynolds!” he said, pretending to speak into a microphone like some kind of stadium emcee. He pushed the earphones off of his ears, the music playing faintly as they hung around his neck. “You going to hot chick’s place on the weekend?” 

It was way too early for this sort of inanity. “What are you talking about?”

“Hot chick is hot _farmer_ , and her name is Miss Emmy Waite,” he said, pulling a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket. “Seb’s mom was giving these out last night- apparently, she’s trying to get a dozen or so folk to go out on Saturday, maybe Sunday.”

Suspiciously, he turned away from the microwave and took the proffered piece of paper, skimming over the words. It was a cheerful little flyer for a Busy Bee, asking for people to come out to Waite Farm on the weekend to help with various jobs, complete with offers of snack food and drinks and happy little cartoon bees in the margins. It was finished off with an equally cheerful passive aggressive reminder that it would be a great way to welcome Emmy to the valley. 

He handed it back to him. “Have fun,” he said flatly, turning back to the microwave. 

“Aww, for real? C’mon dude, I was gonna take Vinnie, let him loose on the pond up there, figured you might wanna bring Jas too?”

Fuck, Jas _would_ want to go too- she’d think it was the most magnificent adventure, running around in the wild grass and the woods. And if Sam’s little brother Vincent knew about it, it was inevitable that Jas would be prattling about it excitedly by the end of the day too, ugh.

“Like I’m gonna waste my weekend doing unpaid farm work,” he said, even knowing that protesting was pointless. If Jas’ pleading didn’t wear him down, Marnie would know about it, and would be sure to nag whenever she saw him.

Sam didn’t even look put out by his surliness. “A’ight bro, just lemme know if Jas wants to come along, okay? We can swing by the ranch and take her with us if you guys are cool with it.”

He tried not to think of the miserable little shack Emmy was living in, and the overgrown weeds encroaching on the house. The microwave beeped, and he pulled out the plate. “Whatever, man,” he said, refusing to commit one way or another.

Sam shrugged, pulling his earphones back onto his head. “Lemme know tomorrow!” he said, shuffling out of the room to a beat that Shane couldn’t hear. Fuck, honestly, how did he have so much energy so early? So much cheer? 

He picked up one of the pizza rolls and bit into it, just as Morris stuck his head around the door. “I’ll just make a note of that for your next pay, shall I?” he said, eyes narrowed. “Your shift starts in three minutes, so hurry up.”

What a great fucking start to the day.


	4. Chapter 4

Saturday dawned bright and sunny, the promise of an actual proper spring day in the morning air. When Emmy peeked out the window at sunrise, she was relieved to find the sky clear, with not even a hint of clouds; of course, there could have been some hiding just beyond the mountains at the far end of the valley and- no. This wasn't the day for doubt. She’d left her habit of second guessing herself back in Zuzu City, and she wasn't about to revive it again now. 

Not even her catastrophically bad introduction to the town this week was going to change that. 

Robin had promised to arrive just after seven with the necessities, so Emmy braved the chill in the air to dash outside to the camp shower, a tiny waterproof tent hanging from a nearby tree with a spout inside. Hooking up the bag of water she’d been warming on the stove, she still shrieked a little at the cold as she stripped off as quickly as possible and dunked herself under the shower. Her skin smarting in the chill morning air, she couldn’t help but giggle a little at the steam coming off her as she hurried back into the house. It was a novelty having outdoor amenities, sort of like camping while still having a bed and a roof over your head, but she was well and truly looking forward to putting it behind her. Robin had all kinds of grand plans for the weekend, none of which she truly had any idea about whether they were plausible or not, so... right now she was just going to smile and nod. And make friends. And hopefully get herself an indoor bathroom.

She was getting better at dealing with the old iron stove, and she made herself a two minute sachet of porridge in a pot with only minor spills. She was still desperately looking forward to the possibility of getting an electric stove, or at least a microwave.

She took the bowl out to the porch to eat as she waited, sitting on the step as far as possible from the sagging, broken end; she eyed it sourly as a dead leaf drifted down from the gutter, shuffling even further across the step in response. 

The farm was so absurdly peaceful at this hour of the morning, it was almost surreal. There was a light breeze toying with the long grass, and it never ceased to amaze her just how deep and rich the quiet was- the silence had been excruciating on her first night in the valley, far more used to the unending noise of city living, but even just a few days later, she could hear and appreciate the myriad of sounds that were layered through the morning. The way the wind wound through the trees, rustling the new growth on the branches; the way the frogs had not quite ceased their dawn chorus, still singing merrily from the nearby pond. 

It was beautiful, and deeply refreshing. Like her soul was taking a long, tired drink after being shrivelled and dry for far too long. 

She was still sitting on the step with her empty bowl in her lap when she heard an engine rumbling in the distance, and turned to face the front gate of the farm. After a moment, a rather beat-up old van came trundling around the turn, lovingly painted with brightly coloured flowers with cartoon faces; it was hauling a trailer near to overflowing with building supplies, the whole affair creaking rather warningly as it navigated the mud track. It came to a groaning halt just in front of the house, Emmy climbing to her feet to greet them. 

The passenger door swung open at the same time that the side door slid open, and Robin and Maru climbed out together. A moment later, the driver’s side door banged as well, and the gangly, long-legged son who had said two words to her on their last meeting came loping around the side of the van as well. 

She didn’t have time to worry about the sullen expression on his face, scowling from inside his hoodie, because Maru all but threw herself up the stairs excitedly, half-lunging for her as if to hug her before realising they might not be on that level of friendship yet. “Emmy!” she said, bumping her with her shoulder instead. “I brought that shampoo I was telling you about- Seb buys it in bulk for me online, so I had a spare couple of bottles.”

Emmy couldn’t help but sigh happily; she hadn’t packed more than basic toiletries before heading out to the valley, and the range of products in Pierre’s store had been, uh... _limited_. There hadn’t really been anything she felt comfortable using on her hair, and when she’d asked over at JojaMart if they stocked anything for black hair, the girl had just blinked at her and said “... like, to dye your hair black?”

Maru was staring out over the field towards the camp shower. “But, uh... take it from me, not a fun time trying to use it in one of those. Made summer camping trips far less enjoyable, hoo boy.” 

“Hold out until we can christen that new bathroom for you,” Robin called, already at the back of the trailer as she started pulling open the rope fastenings. 

“Maybe just a fast rinse,” Maru whispered loudly. “It’ll take a few days for the grout to dry, you don’t wanna go a whole week.” 

The prospect of using the camp shower even for a quick hair rinse wasn’t appealing, but Maru was right- she could usually go a week comfortably without needing to wash as long as she used lotion, but two weeks was pushing it. 

More adventures with the camp shower, then.

“Seb, could you come here please? I need another pair of hands.”

Sebastian grunted as he ambled down the length of the van to assist, and Maru winced apologetically. “He’s not a morning person,” she whispered again. 

“Be nice, Maru,” Robin called. 

Emmy took her empty breakfast bowl back inside with the precious bottle of shampoo, nabbing her giant straw hat from the hook behind the door as she headed out again. If she was going to pretend at playing farmer, she might as well look the part- and the last thing she wanted was to get sunburnt in her very first week. Her myriad of terrible adventures were long enough already, she didn’t need to add to them thank you very much. 

Robin was already off like a rocket, dragging lengths of wood from the trailer and laying them beside the house as she called instructions to Maru and Sebastian. Maru was carefully itemizing their supplies, counting out buckets with a cute little crease between her eyebrows, and Sebastian was already hard at work with some kind of peculiarly rounded shovel. 

“What should I do?” she asked, her hat flopping down into her eyes. 

She found a can of spray paint thrust into her hands, and she blinked in surprise. “Head around the area around the house with that,” Robin said, “and use it to mark out things for today.”

“Uh...” Well, she already felt dumb as a bag of rocks, so they were off to a flying start. “Things for today?”

“Oh!” Robin straightened, pushing the escaped bits of hair out of her face. “Sorry dear- things for us to work on, so if you need trees cut down, or if you want to mark out paths you’d like, so if we get time we can lay down some gravel, and maybe give an indication of the areas you’d like cleared for the plants.”

That wasn’t so bad; she could do that. 

She wandered away from the house, absently shaking the spray can, trying to determine what was a good use of everyone’s time today. She was very aware of the fact that no one was obligated to come out and help her, so she was determined not to look too demanding on their time. Wandering up to a nearby tree that was leaning at a very uncomfortable angle towards the house- and to be honest, was probably responsible for a good number of the leaves in the gutters that had fallen on her when the porch roof had collapsed- she tentatively pressed down on the top of the can. 

It fizzled awkwardly, spluttering a faint mist of colour against the trunk; she felt her cheeks heat, glancing quickly over her shoulder to make sure no one had seen her make an idiot of herself by using a spray can wrong. The others were on the other side of the house, their voices clear in the morning air but well and truly out of sight. 

Sticking her tongue out of her mouth as she concentrated, she pushed down a little harder, and a bright stream of colour lurched across the tree trunk. After a moment’s practice, she managed to make it look like a very wonky tick symbol, the paint dribbling down the bark as if it was melting. 

She got better at it as she went, leaving colourful ticks on tree stumps and oversized boulders; paths were harder, and she was terrible at making straight lines. She’d just gotten to the front gate, pondering whether or not to clear away the fence area- because it was obviously easy enough for a van to get through, so it couldn’t be too bad, right?- when she jumped a half mile when someone cleared their throat pointedly behind her. 

She almost spun around with the spray can aimed like a pepper spray before common sense kicked in; the laugh behind her certainly proved that her monumentally over the top reaction hadn’t gone unnoticed, and it took everything she had not to cringe as she turned around. She came face to face with a young man, probably a year or so younger than herself, and not someone she recognised from any of her jaunts into town. 

No time like the present to make new friends. “Are you... here for the Busy Bee?” she asked tentatively. 

“ _Hi Alex!_ ” Maru yelled from the background.

He laughed, flashing a broad grin. “Guess I am,” he said. “Alex Mullner.”

“Emmy Waite,” she said, extending a hand towards him in greeting.

He was boyishly handsome, in a generic white-boy sort of way, the sort of inoffensively charming good looks that graced every fashion shoot and every magazine cover the world over. Tousled brown hair, appropriately windswept, and a brilliant smile that seemed to be a permanent fixture on his face. Beneath the rather telling varsity jacket was a thin cotton singlet with a faded sports icon on the front, something that seemed completely foolish to be wearing in this lingering not-quite-winter.

She knew his type. Her younger brother, Andrew, was on the swim team for Zuzu University, and he reeked of the same kind of wildly overconfident machismo; hopefully he wasn’t going to be cut from the same cloth entirely. 

He graced her with a beaming smile as he took her proffered hand, but instead of shaking it as expected, he pulled her arm and brought her hand up to his face, pressing a chaste kiss across the back of her gloved knuckles. 

Emmy’s face flamed, and from behind her she heard several tell-tale giggles. 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Waite,” he said, the grin almost sly as he straightened again. He didn’t let go of her hand immediately. “My grandparents send their regards.”

She blinked, smile frozen in place as she tried to work out who his grandparents were. Had she met them at the store, maybe?

He cocked an eyebrow. “The Mullners?” he asked, as if that cleared things up. 

Emmy awkwardly took her hand back, tucking it around her waist while the other moved up to push her hair back behind her ear. “I, uh... I’m afraid I don’t know who they are,” she said stiltedly. 

His expression fell; he was so bizarrely expressive, like a puppy. “Aw, for real? Grammy talks about Alfie all the time, gushing about how lovely he was. Says they all used to come out in the autumn to help with the orchard.”

He grinned again, the momentary disappointment forgotten. “And at the end of the season, she says they used to have a big bonfire night and get drunk on all the cider he’d brewed. So if you’re looking to revive the farm, my vote goes to Bonfire Night.”

“I’ll, um- I’ll keep that in mind?” 

It _did_ sound fun, in a wild, uncouth sort of way- it definitely wasn’t the sort of activity her family would ever have condoned, so that made it all the more appealing. She didn’t know the first thing about brewing cider, but autumn was months away, after all. Surely she had time to look up an article or two on the internet. 

How hard could it be?

Alex smiled with his whole face, his eyes sparkling with mischief, and Maru was grinning delightedly as Emmy led him over to Robin for an assignment. She set him to mixing the first batch of cement, lugging buckets of water from the nearby pond rather than risking running the hose again in case the porch took that as a challenge; Maru slid up beside Emmy and nudged her in the ribs, giggling behind her hand when Emmy blushed again. 

More people arrived as the sun rose, including a few faces that were a little more familiar to her. Lewis was there, and Robin’s husband Demetrius turned up an hour or so after them in some tiny little electric hatchback that hardly looked capable of navigating the mud of the farm road. There were a couple of girls who she’d seen around town, one who Maru greeted so enthusiastically that she had to watch them for a moment to check that this _Penny_ wasn’t her girlfriend. Another few young men, one of whom brought his younger brother in tow with him, the boy making a beeline straight for the branches of a low hanging tree as soon as his brother wasn’t watching. The brother appeared to be too busy watching _her_ , a fact that wasn’t lost on Emmy. 

“Clint told me he was gonna try and make it down for a few hours,” Robin told her breathlessly at one point, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. Sebastian’s mysterious round shovel had been for digging post holes, and they’d just spent the last hour carefully placing the initial frame for the bathroom in said holes along with the cement mix, a feat of no small significance. “He’s the town blacksmith, and he was going to help me with the electrics. I can do it, but I’d rather have the help.”

Emmy glanced at her watch. “It’s only nine o’clock just now,” she said. 

“True,” Robin said, but the furrows on her brow didn’t relax. In fact, they only deepened as she watched something over Emmy’s shoulder, the expression turning into a scowl as she muttered “Excuse me,” and pushed past her. Emmy turned to watch her, shouting a scolding out to where Sebastian and Sam- she’d learned his name now- were flicking wet cement at each other with the trowels. Despite the scolding from Robin, they were laughing, and Emmy couldn’t help but laugh in return, taking in the work that was being done around her. 

Lewis was rather pompously calling directions to the few girls who’d come along- Leah? She thought that was the other girl’s name helping Penny- as they hacked away at the brambles that seemed to have the promises of berries growing on the winding branches. Demetrius was over by the pond, taking turns with an axe to cut down the overgrown trees with the help of a young man who seemed entirely overwrought by the whole affair; he looked like he was about to swoon dramatically if he so much as lifted a finger, but despite his wailing they’d apparently made good progress on the trees. The little boy was still playing near to them, except that now he’d been joined by a little girl in a terribly inappropriate purple smock, the hem already an inch deep with mud as they crouched on the banks shrieking excitedly at a frog. 

She frowned- she hadn’t seen the girl come with anyone, and from the noise they were making, she couldn’t have been there that long, but then who-

“Hey.”

Almost instantly, her shoulders went tense, and pulse jumping into overdrive at the sound of _his_ voice. Trying not to cringe as she turned towards him, she wasn’t sure if the smile on her face came across as very genuine; it certainly didn’t feel genuine. 

Shane was standing behind her, wearing the same worn old hoodie and the same khaki shorts he’d been wearing the last time they’d been stuck together. If she hadn’t seen him wandering around his own house half naked, she would’ve wondered if they were attached to his body, simply extensions of his skin, instead of separate items of clothing. He looked just as ragged and rundown as he had the other day, something miserable and almost... panicky in his eyes?

Well, large group of strangers, she could relate to the panicky part. 

“Hey,” she said awkwardly. 

He stared somewhere just over her shoulder, jaw tight as if he was gritting his teeth. “Hey,” he said flatly, as if he hadn’t already said that. 

She hugged her elbow, still trying not to cringe. “You, uh... you didn’t have to come out today.”

He shrugged. “Jas wanted to come,” he said. 

_But I didn’t_. He didn’t need to say it out loud for her to hear the words hanging between them. Reaching up and pushing her hair away from her face, she said “Uh, so, who is Jas? Is she your daughter?”

He paled, if that was at all possible given how unhealthily pasty he was to begin with, and his eyes went wide. “Goddaughter,” he said quickly, the sort of quickly that made it obvious he needed to cover something up as fast as possible and bury it deep. “She’s my goddaughter.”

“Oh,” she said. “Um, and she lives with you? On the ranch, I mean.”

“Yep. Yes. She does.” 

“Well, that’s nice,” she said, waiting for the earth to swallow her up in embarrassment. 

And then he said the last thing she expected of him. “Do you- um. Do you want to meet her?” 

She blinked. “Uh- sure. Yeah, I’d love to meet her.” 

He lifted his hands to his mouth and bellowed “ _Jas!_ ”, drawing the attention of everyone for a moment; the little girl in the muddy purple smock stuck her head up over the bank, eyes wide as she stared at them from across the field. Shane beckoned to her, and she scrambled up the side of the pond and skipped over to them. He ruffled her hair in an awkward display of affection, and she scrunched up her face at him, attempting to right her hair bows. “Jas, this is the new neighbour. Remember Aunt Marnie was telling you?”

Jas stared up at her solemnly, and Emmy was struck by how very similar her colouring was to Shane’s. The same dark hair, the same pale skin; she glanced between them, wondering even more about his immediate need to correct her assumption on their relationship. “It’s nice to meet you, Jas,” she said, crouching down to be on her eye level. 

Her eyes were a dark blue, compared to Shane’s green- _how did she know already what colour his eyes were_ \- so she’d just about chalked it up to paranoia on her part when Jas sighed dramatically. “You’ve been in my house,” she said, her words serious but still loud enough to carry to those closest to them. 

The farm was still not polite enough to open up a maw in the earth and swallow her whole and spare her from further humiliation. 

She glanced nervously over Jas’ shoulder, seeing Leah and Penny watching her curiously. Alex, too. Damn it all. “That’s right,” she said, with false cheer as she smiled at Jas, hoping desperately for a smile in return. “Your Aunt Marnie took good care of me, when I was lost.” 

That answer seemed to soothe the curiosity of the watchers, and they all turned back to their tasks; Alex was the last to return to his job, digging out a huge boulder from the middle of the field nearby. He’d taken off his jacket at some point and was taking every advantage the sleeveless top provided him to show off his muscular arms and shoulders. 

The answer seemed to satisfy Jas too, who nodded solemnly. “You should come over again,” she said. “I got pancakes while you were there.” 

“That’s enough, Jas,” Shane said quickly, “why don’t you go play with Vincent again?”

She needed no further encouragement, skipping off without even saying goodbye. 

“She’s really nice,” Emmy said quietly, as she rose back to her feet.

Shane was staring after her, something bitter and dark in his mood. “She is,” he said, just as quietly, and for a second she thought he was going to continue, and say something more, but then he shook himself. “What do you want me for today?” 

They’re weren’t the last to arrive, with Clint showing up not long after that, and Robin assured her that she’d made arrangements with the owner of the saloon to bring a lunch spread up for everyone. As the sun climbed through the sky, it actually all seemed too good to be true- there was a decent measure of land cleared from in front of the house, and Sam and Sebastian were attempting to repair the sagging porch while Robin made a start on installing the plumbing, digging around near the front of the house to find the water mains. 

It was genuinely too good to be true, as far as she was concerned- a whole town full of people, rallying around a stranger to make her feel welcome? Not even her own family ever bothered themselves that much with her feelings, and certainly none of the sycophantic hangers-on that surrounded her family ever instilled a great deal of warmth in her. The closest thing she’d ever had to friendship was her roommate in college, a girl she had almost started dating- right up until her parents had caught wind of the fledgling romance, and had paid the college to have them separated. Rose had received a mysterious scholarship to a prestigious music school on the other side of the country, leaving without a word, and it wasn’t until later, nursing her broken heart, that Emmy had put two and two together and realised her family had paid her off to leave her.

Friendship, she knew, was always conditional; kindness came with a list of prerequisites. 

What was happening here today didn’t seem to comply with either of those rules, and it was as terrifying as it was beautiful. 

As promised, a portly man by the name of Gus arrived around eleven, his old sedan joining the row of cars slowly growing on the edge of the farm. He had a few platters on the backseat, a collections of cold cut sandwiches and lukewarm pastries hiding under a layer of alfoil, and everyone fell on them with gusto. 

One of the pieces of alfoil got caught by the breeze and flew up into the air; laughing, she chased it while everyone stood around with their hands full of food. And of course, the morning had been going far too well, because it got caught in the branches of one of the trees beside the pond.

“Be careful, Emmy,” Maru called, as she shimmied up to the lowest branch and reached out over the water to grab it.

“I’ll be fine,” she called back. 

The branch broke. 

With a squeal, she went tumbling down into the water, the shallows not quite deep enough for her to go under fully, but certainly enough to see her clothes utterly soaked. There were shouts of alarm from behind her, but to her great surprise she found herself laughing. 

_Laughing._

“ _Emmy!_ ”

“I’m fine,” she called over her shoulder, trying to awkwardly clamber to her feet; the mud was soft underneath her, and it was hard to get her balance, and even harder when she _kept laughing_ -

There was a splash behind her, and her laugh became a squeak when someone hooked her under the arms and managed to drag her back to the bank. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, slipping and falling against her rescuer. 

He grunted. “Sure, you’re doing just fine by yourself,” Shane said, his tone almost mocking. He pushed her off of him almost as if it burned him to touch her.

She wouldn’t let him ruin her amusement, she _wouldn’t_. “Thank you for the rescue,” she said instead, finding her feet at last.

He shrugged, looking immensely uncomfortable. Behind him, Alex looked to have been about half a second away from throwing himself into the pond in a similar rescue attempt, and there was something sour in his eyes as he turned and went back to his food. 

Emmy tried not to read too much into his expression, and instead turned back to Shane.

“I always end up wet around you,” she said with a laugh- and then froze.

His eyes widened, and behind him, she saw Alex pause.

“That’s not-” _Yoba, please let me just die right now_. “I didn’t mean- not like _that!_ I wouldn’t just, that’s- not that!”

Shane’s expression couldn’t have been more dumbstruck if he’d been hit by a train. 

Her face burning, she hugged her arms around herself tightly. “I’m, um- I need to get changed. The mud, you know. Um.”

He didn’t say anything. 

She fled inside. 

The rest of the afternoon passed fairly uneventfully after that particular hiccup, and by the time everyone began to wind down around three, Robin was declaring herself well pleased with their progress. The cement was going to set overnight, meaning they could lay the floor tomorrow, but she and Clint already had the plumbing and most of the electrics in place ready to go. 

Even more exciting, Maru and Penny had found the old orchard off to the north, the trees wild and the paths buried under twenty odd years of dead leaves and rotten fruit. They needed some careful tending, but there was obviously already a few promising buds on some of the branches, and the thought that she might have her own fruit trees blossoming within weeks roused a sense of pride in her that she’d only ever felt when she’d performed with the various orchestras she’d played for over the years.

She had a farm, she had new friends, she had plans in place, things were going so well; she kept looking over her shoulder, waiting for there to be a catch, but so far...

So far so good. 

Alex was one of the last to leave, pointedly lingering and finding reasons to stay; eventually, Emmy took the hint and offered to walk him to the gate, giving them a modicum of privacy from where Robin and Sebastian were trying to disconnect the trailer from the van.

“Thanks for coming out today,” she said, as they wandered over to the fence. 

“Hey, my pleasure. Always good to help a neighbour.”

She smiled. “Not to push my luck at all, but do you think you’ll be back tomorrow?”

“Are you kidding? Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” They came to a stop at the front gate, the sign for the farm creaking softly as the breeze pushed it. “Plus, you know, it’s the off-season right now, don’t have to worry about missing the game.”

She’d spent enough evenings miserable as anything in the gold box at Zuzu City Stadium to have a good idea what he meant. “Gridball?”

He lit up like a supernova. “Hell yeah, gridball. You a fan?”

“I know enough to follow along, but not really.”

“Ah.” He deflated slightly. “I’m looking to go professional, get a scholarship and get on a team, you know?” He mimed throwing a ball. “Got it all planned out.”

He really was just like her brother; he was sweeter, though, and she hated to think he might lose that kindness if he went away to the city. “It’s a good plan,” she said quietly.

He was still grinning at her, in a way that felt very close and warm, and the moment seemed a lot more private than she was expecting.

“Hey,” he said, the smile sort of hesitantly forced for a moment as he looked at her, “just uh, can I say something?”

Oh, Yoba. Not _ask_ something, but _say_ something. The one thing she’d been worried about all day was Alex’s mention of his grandparents- did they know who she was? Did they remember Abigail, if they remembered Alfie? Had they sent Alex out here today to snoop and report back, with information about the runaway heiress hiding up on the old farm? 

She was sure her smile was just as forced as his was, but she nodded. “Go right ahead.”

He cleared his throat, rubbing at his back with one arm over his shoulder. “So,” he said slowly, “I get that you’re new in town and all, figure you haven’t had a chance to get to know everyone yet, but there’s some things you oughta know about some folk round here.”

_Here it comes..._ “I don’t know what you mean,” she said innocently, miserable that her grand chance for freedom had only lasted a week. 

“That Reynolds guy,” Alex said, and Emmy blinked.

“I- what?”

“The Reynolds guy, what’s his name, Shaun? Shane?” He dropped his arm, shrugging as he did so. “He ain’t a good sort, you know?”

The rush of relief she felt at her secret still being safe was far too overwhelming for her to care too much about his warning. “What do you mean?” she asked, trying to keep the relieved smile from her face. 

Alex winced, still smiling, and it looked almost like he was grimacing. “He’s a drunk, you know? Not like, having a drink on the weekend with friends drunk. A bad drunk.” She must have looked confused, because he sighed. “You guys aren’t like, close or anything, are you?” 

She felt her stomach lurch. “What? No, no that’s- no! No, of course not!” 

The relief on his face was almost- what? Flattering? Embarrassing? A reminder of her brothers eternally meddling in the affairs of any potential flames she’d had over the years? _Lord_ , not that she was thinking of Shane as a potential flame, nothing could be further from the truth, Yoba save her-

“That’s great,” Alex said, cutting off her runaway thoughts. “I mean, uh... great that you’re not putting yourself at risk.”

She felt a pang of guilt in her belly. “Is he that bad?” she asked quietly. He wasn’t exactly a sociable type, and he hadn’t exactly been pleasant to her, but... he’d taken pity on her, that day at JojaMart, and he’d stopped to save her when she’d been lost in the storm. Those weren’t the actions of some kind of heartless jerk. 

But Alex’s face closed off, his eyes hard. “Look, Emmy, take it from someone who’s had a lifetime of dealing with a drunk- there ain’t any nice ones.”

It felt remarkably private, like he’d just offered up some secret part of himself, and she didn’t know what to say. “Thank you,” she said. “For, um, for both. The warning and for helping.”

The darkness was gone in a flash, replaced again by that charming smile. “Any time,” he said, throwing her a wink. “I’ll see you tomorrow, ‘kay?”

He sauntered off down the path towards town, whistling merrily, and Emmy couldn’t help but smile. 

An eventful first week, but a productive one. Maybe this wasn’t going to be such a disastrous idea after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is horrifically late compared to when I wanted to post it, but we had a cataclysm and lost both of our laptops at home within two days of each other. I've been doing my writing mostly at work, and it severely limits when I'm able to write (for obvious reasons). Sorry! Hopefully we'll be getting one of them back after the weekend and I can go back to having more reliable internet access than my phone.


End file.
